Rachel Maddow is a Media Bully

Rachel Maddow recently indulged in a strange episode of media bullying, using a half a dozen disreputable and dishonest techniques to smear an obscure writer and psychotherapist, Richard Cohen, whose business it is to help homosexuals who wish to live heterosexual lives to do so.

Therapists such as Mr. Cohen are an object of special hatred for organized homosexuality, and that lobby probably has never had so prominent a voice as Miss Maddow’s. To be sure, Cohen is a distinctly unsympathetic figure. His psychotherapeutic work is pure New Age goo, but that is to be expected: Psychotherapy is pseudoscience. At its least destructive it amounts to idle chatter; at its worst it is a reality-displacing religion substitute, advancing beliefs that are every bit as fundamentalist and anti-rational as any desert jihadist’s, if not so violent.

In this context, there is nothing uniquely offensive about Mr. Cohen’s brand of pseudoscience. America offers a splendiferous bouquet of preposterous belief systems from which the connoisseur of the absurd may choose. Miss Maddow, strangely, made much of the fact that Mr. Cohen is not a licensed psychotherapist, as though being a chartered practitioner of witch-doctoring were preferable to being a freelance operator. She repeatedly dismissed his arguments on the grounds that he has no professional credentials. But what, precisely, are Miss Maddow’s professional credentials for pronouncing on matters psychotherapeutic? She has a D.Phil. in politics and wrote her thesis about prison health care.